ART REVIEW; Illuminated Pages Capturing a Fading World

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: October 21, 2005

The New York Public Library is a great national resource. If it were a natural one, it would be forested with oil rigs and pocked with mines of gold and silver. Being a cultural resource, the library's riches are truly inexhaustible, benefiting succeeding generations. But this doesn't rule out the bibliographical equivalent of a freshly struck mother lode. The latest proof is ''The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at the New York Public Library.''

This magnificent exhibition is the first in the library's history devoted to its considerable holdings in medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. It puts on public display some 100 almost unremittingly gorgeous, intriguing books made from the late 900's to the early 1500's. These constitute a third of one of the largest, most important collections of manuscripts in North America.

During the years spanned by the show, secular thought began to prevail over religion, and Europe became Europe. And manuscript illumination was at its peak as both an art and an industry. The compact, often exquisite artifacts were like portable altarpieces, only more talkative, and raw. Even today, their disparate elements of text, image and decoration coexist in tenuous, implicitly lively states. They were written, illustrated and bound by hand in surprising quantities, in monasteries, convents and workshops across Europe, creating a network of centers where national, local and provincial styles intersected and cross-fertilized.

The books themselves carried the seeds, spreading new developments in the artistic rendering of bodies and space and the latest variations on the scrolling, ornately filigreed foliate borders -- perhaps the most persistent of all the decorative conventions found in illuminated manuscripts. In 14th-century Paris, checkered backdrops (gold and two other colors) seem to have been the rage, and you can see England and the Netherlands picking up the trend.

Understandably, illustrated manuscripts were inordinately hot commodities, coveted, commissioned and collected by anyone who could afford them. These clients were primarily kings, popes, nobles, monks and, as time passed, the upper echelons of the growing merchant class. Today the manuscripts function as especially revealing gauges of the shifting winds of history, ideas, literature, artistic styles and social mores.

Above all, the exhibition makes the economic and spiritual power of faith starkly tangible, if a little oppressive. The displays are dominated by historical Bibles, lectionaries, private prayer books and Books of Hours, as well as liturgical texts whose ceremonial purposes dictated not only words and illuminations but also scores for chants and, at times, the dimensions of small tables.

A few of the manuscripts on view are widely known, like the sumptuous Tickhill Psalter from early-14th-century England, whose opening page, gleaming with gold and coiling with richly colored foliate patterns, is as dense as a Persian carpet. But about half the works here have never or only rarely been exhibited. As recently as 30 years ago, several had yet to be completely cataloged.

It was about that time that the current show became a gleam in the mind of James H. Marrow, now professor emeritus of art history at Princeton University. Then, he was a graduate student doing research among the New York library's illuminated manuscripts. He realized one day that many of the volumes he was studying had never been reproduced or written about.

Even now the ''Health Handbook,'' compiled by Giovanni Cadamosto of Lodi in Ferrara after 1472 and featured prominently in the show's section on secular manuscripts, is identified in the catalog as ''almost entirely unstudied and unpublished.'' Its open pages illustrate the healing properties of spring water. A woman carries buckets through a nearly vertical landscape beside a river that is deliciously unfinished, its swirling waters and bathers penciled in.

The show was organized by Mr. Marrow; Jonathan J.G. Alexander, a professor of medieval European art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts; and Lucy Freeman Sandler, professor emerita at N.Y.U. and the institute. They have been assisted, especially with the show's lavish catalog, by Elizabeth Moodey, an independent scholar, and Todor T. Petev, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Both the exhibition and catalog have been overseen within the library by H. George Fletcher, its director for special collections.

The installation is beautifully orchestrated, with telling juxtapositions and changes of pace -- most notably a tendency to follow lavish with plain -- that keep the eye sharp. In one vitrine, four Bibles in English are each open to a page that features a decorated initial T; these run the gamut from quick sketch to enamel-like density. The show is also relatively well lighted, which is no small feat where manuscripts are concerned. Even so, viewing images in partly open books, especially small ones, remains a challenge. A sign of the future is that both the Tickhill Psalter and Boccaccio's ''Of Famous Women,'' one of the high points of the secular section, are flanked by high-definition screens programmed to enable the viewer to flip, digitally speaking, through additional pages.